KIRKUS REVIEW

A Georgia college professor attempts
to escape the ghosts of history in Stewart’s debut novel.

Atlanta, 1996: the Olympics have
just left town, and historian Travis Hemperly has returned there to take up a
temporary teaching position at a historically black college. The white Hemperly’s
previous teaching experience includes three years at the University of
Minnesota followed by a year of performing Viking re-enactments at a tourist
destination in Newfoundland, Canada—neither of which has sufficiently prepared
him for a career in what Abraham Baldwin Longman, one of his new colleagues, jokingly
refers to as “Blackademia”:
“Travis is out of his element. He has never taught on a historically black
campus, has never been a minority on any piece of real estate he has ever set
foot on.” It’s a difficult transition, though one that Travis is willing to
make if only because there aren’t many other options for him in the shrinking
academic market. Despite cultural differences and disparate sensitivities,
things begin to improve—until another colleague discovers that Travis’
conspiracy-obsessed father, Henry Hemperly, hosts the racist AM-radio call-in
show “Confederate Talk Radio.” What’s more, a discussion of lynching reminds
Travis of a story that his father told him when he was boy about an event Henry
witnessed in the tiny village of Haylow, where a man was tied to a tree and murdered
with an ax. In order to remain in his new position, Travis will have to come to
terms with some history outside his area of specialization—that of his family
and that of the South. Stewart tells Travis’ story in lucid, observant prose (“There
is a lot to look at up in the sky tonight, a lot of action going on in the
cosmos….All of this astronomical activity must mean something, so it seems like
the right night for an appeal to the universe”), and he gives
his novel a buoyant satirical gloss without teetering too far into
ridiculousness. His characters are well-drawn and generally quite complex—even
the largely unsympathetic ones—and the dialogue in particular crackles with
personality. The book does drag in some sections and might have been improved
with a bit of condensing. Even so, it represents an amusing and sometimes quite
scathing look at academia, racial tensions, and the oppressive weight of the
past that still characterizes life in the South.

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